Quarantine

Mayra wondered around the town, trying to see if she noticed something. She wanted to know what was going on in the town, and the only thing that she could think of to do was watching the people of Four Trees. If she could see the way people were acting, then it would help. Blake was doing the same thing, just not on the same part of the town. They agreed to half the town between the two of them.

She was already slightly bored of this. She wasn’t going to see anything at least not right now. She walked next to the grocery store, glancing at the people walking in and out. It wasn’t too bad walking the town since it wasn’t that big. She was focusing her attention where the most of the people were. It made more sense for her attention to be where the higher concentration of people were. She kept her ears open to the rest of her surroundings.

She slightly wondered if Blake was getting any luck. All Mayra could see was the fearful faces of the people who won’t admit that there wasn’t something going on with them. She noticed that some of them had waved to her or just smiled at her. She responded back with a wave or a smile. She was glad that none of them wanted to talk to her because she didn’t know what she would say if they asked about what was going on. She couldn’t really say that she didn’t know. She sighed, getting more and more bored with this as the minutes slowly ticked by.

Blake was having the same luck as Mayra except people were actually coming up to him and asking about things. He kind of wished that Mayra had taken the half with Avery’s Diner on it. Blake stood in front of the diner talking to some of the girls that were walking out. They all wanted to know what was going on and what they were doing to stop it.

“Right now, we don’t really know what’s going on completely. We are watching to see if there is another episode and hope that we can see the cause,” Blake said calmly. He was always better with calmly the town than Mayra was. She got the facts, and he calmed the crowd. That’s why they worked out so great together. “We are trying to get the bottom of this, ladies.”

“You better be,” Meredith Jameson said, walking out of the diner. “I’m scared of just going to work.” That was a lie. She lived right next door to the newspaper building. She lived only ten feet from her work place. She had nothing to be scared of.

“I promise, Meredith, we are going to take care of this as soon as possible,” Blake said for the tenth time before to other woman and a couple men. “We are going to get this handled.”

“Oh, you should tell him your theory, Mary,” a timid voice said. Blake looked over to see Velma Richmond. He had dated her back in high school, but now she looked even skinnier and like she was sick. He didn’t even know that she still lived in Four Trees.

“Theory?” Blake asked, not at all surprised. Meredith had something to say about every little thing. It was just that there wasn’t always solid proof to hold up her ‘theories’ that she always posted in the weekly newspapers.

“Yeah, I’m going to post in the weeks newspaper. I think what’s going on is an experimental dug gone wrong,” she said proudly. It was almost like she expected to be given some sort of medal for just thinking of that. “I’m planning on writing up the article tomorrow. If you find anything out, you should send it my way.”

Blake wanted to yell at her for just thinking that he was just going to give her information because she wanted more facts to support her. Of course, that wasn’t much of a surprise coming from her, it was just that he hated that she was so blunt about it. “Once we find out what is really going on, we will be more than welcome to talk to you to help inform the town,” Blake said carefully.

Meredith knew what he was doing, and she was more than a little irked that he wouldn’t just come up and say something about it. She thought about saying something that Blake had told her some facts about it, but she knew that the chief would just force her to make an article to apologize about it. She wasn’t allowed to talk bad about the officers of the town as much as she wanted to.

“Well, I’ll just say that the cops will tell the town when they have all the facts on what was going on,” Meredith said without the brightness that she had earlier.

Blake knew that she was giving him something that she wasn’t going to back down from. He also knew that was a good idea to give into this one small thing. “That would be alright,” Blake said with a very dull smile.

Meredith had hopped for one of his bright and mouthwatering smiles, but she figured that she had pushed him enough for one day. “Well, I’m going to go start looking into more possible theories. I’ll be sure to let you know if I find anything that you haven’t found yet,” she said, trying to get him to change his mind.

Blake knew what she was up to and he wasn’t going to give in to her wants. He knew well enough that if he gave into her once, he wouldn’t ever be able to get away from her demands because she would hang it over his head as long as he had something that he could give her. That’s the only thing about Meredith if she could make someone look like a fool in front of the whole town she was going to have something to dangle over their heads to force them into compliance. That made him sick and wished that he could do something about it, but her uncle was the police chief which gave little room to stop her behavior.